Over the past week we’ve quietly launched two new forum features: Subforums and Stickies. You can probably guess what they do, but here’s a quick rundown anyway:
Subforums
Up until now, there was no way to organize your forum topics into groups. With the new subforums, you can group topics together into subforums, which can also contain other subforums. It’s pretty standard organization stuff.
Stickies
The default ordering for forum threads is by last update. The most recently updated one sits on top, and the others are pushed down from there. Now, if you mark a topic as sticky, it jumps to the top and stays there until you un-sticky it. Again, pretty standard stuff.
What next?
This completes a short iteration of forum features that I’ve been wanting to add for a while. The forums still aren’t done, nor will they ever be, but there are a ton of other features and bugs that need attention. But, this is a great time to get feedback: What else does the forum need to make your game better? I’ve got a few ideas, but I’m always open to your thoughts.
Obsidian Portal is the award winning Online Campaign Management System for tabletop role-playing games. It’s free to use, it can be accessed from any web browser and it's built from the ground up for gamers by gamers.
We host a huge community of tabletop RPG players who are all looking to get the most out of their tabletop gaming experience. You play your campaign and we help you manage it. It’s that simple.
Hi Micah, thanks for the new features! I had a few requests on those, and wanted to add some additional feature requests here for easy reference.
SUBFORUMS:
* Delete subforum
* Change subforum order (can work around by renaming each one so they’re in the right order, but if threads have already been moved, this will be annoying to do)
* On main Forums page, show last-updated thread in each subforum, possibly with link directly to thread
STICKIES:
* Ability to choose any single character or symbol as sticky indicator?
OTHER FORUM FEATURES:
* Show most recent poster for each thread on the main Forums page
* Add a link on main Forums page for “latest page” or “latest post” of each thread
* Allow recipients to choose email notification rather than poster, or allow all-recipients-unchecked to actually not send any notifications instead of defaulting to each user’s contact preferences (I know you know this is a bug already)
* As a player option, allow selection for number of posts per page on Thread pages.
* Allow GM/Player secrets in forum posts
* Allow option for players to post as an owned Character, using that character’s portrait as the posting avatar
* Allow option for GMs or co-GMs to post as any Character, using that character’s portrait as the posting avatar
Good ideas here, Nik. No promises on anything, but we’ll be working on a couple of those.
Hi,
I just noticed the new subforums and they are fantastic! The feature-devoid forums were my main concern with keeping my 15-player live-action game on Obsidian Portal, as this player group is used to using forums actively during the month between games, but they haven’t taken to OP’s forums much at all. Stickies and subforums should go a long way to helping with this. (I would feel very happy if this game finished with the players having had a positive experience on OP, such that the next game director decides to put their game on here as well).
I’m wondering, though, is there a way to move old threads to new subforums? I would very much like to clean up and sort our old stuff.
(I’d also like to second the request for a display of the most recent poster, the lack of this is a major kick to usability).
Thanks again. It’s really nice to see the many minor fixes around the site recently that do so enhance usability.
Yes, as a GM, Editing a thread lets you choose which forum or subforum it should be in and whether it should be sticky.
Either that wasn’t there earlier, or I was trying to edit the first post and didn’t see that other edit option.
I’d like to believe the former, but Occam’s Razor tells me I’m just blind.
Ah well. Thanks!!
Just want to second Nicks request to display last poster to a thread, as well as time (as opposed to 1 day ago etc).
An email option for getting a daily (or weekly) digest of all the posts, rather then an email per post.
(actually this would be good for all updates, not just forum posts)
Would be nice to see a count of number of views of a thread. This will help give better idea if players have read your posts.
I noticed these improvements last week, and just assumed they had always been there, but I just overlooked it. (I am relatively new to the site). good work, keep it coming.
I’ll go ahead and add my voice to the question about moving old threads to new subforums. That would ease my OCD. Other than that, loving it.
Yes, Editing a thread as a GM lets you choose which forum or subforum it should be in and whether it should be sticky.
Thanks!
I would really like an option to be able to make certain sub-forums private. I am going to be GMing for 20 and am breaking that into 2 camps. I would like each Camp forum private to players only as game scheduling info will go on there, heck – I would like to be able to manage who gets access to a sub-forum in general. Since I would limit the camp forums to its members and also I would like a meta forum for my 2 assistant GMs so we can talk about site work, admin details related to the campaign etc etc.